3/11/2005

I’ve been at my job for 10 years now. This is a first for me. I’ve never stayed anywhere for that long before. So I got a little certificate and the boss took us out to lunch at Hooters. (Sadly, there’s not a real strip club that serves lunch anywhere near here, so Hooters had to suffice.) Anyway, it was a fun time, even if today was otherwise kind of a bear. The air conditioner in the computer room broke down, and I had one other computer die today, so I was busy fixing stuff.

Still, I like my job. I realized recently that this is the only job where I’ve ever not used all my vacation time, and the only job where I’ve never called in sick when I wasn’t really sick. So I guess that says something. When I first started, I figured that working in the earthquake business in Los Angeles pretty much had to be an adventure. During the time I’ve been here, we’ve changed from using VAX and VMS to using Sun and white-box commodity PCs with Solaris, FreeBSD, and Linux. Computers that used to cost $50,000 now cost less than $1,000. We’ve had one M7.1 earthquake out in the desert, but nothing big in the city, and the long-awaited Parkfield Earthquake happened. It’s been tremendous fun, and I’d be quite content to just stay here until I retire.